With 1:30 left in the fourth quarter on Wednesday, American Canyon High point guard Davin Lusung found Malik Ghiden on a back-door cut to the basket. Ghiden caught the ball in stride and laid the ball into the hoop for his career-high 35th point.

Neither Ghiden nor Wolves head coach Brett Wedding had any idea how many the senior had in the score book. They were having too much fun beating Benicia.

The host Wolves avenged a frustrating defeat to the Panthers earlier this season with a solid 79-62 win that creates a tie for second place in the Solano County Athletic Conference.

Both teams are 13-10 overall, 4-2 in conference play with four games left in the regular season.

“To be honest, we should have won the first game but we let up in the second half,” said Ghiden, who scored 20 of his points after the intermission. “(Benicia) just came back and got us but this time, we were told by the coaches, ‘Don’t let up.’ We just did what we needed to do.”

The Panthers were missing star junior forward Lafayle Fuller, who was ejected from Saturday’s game with St. Patrick-St. Vincent and was ineligible to play against American Canyon.

Panthers head coach Steve Carter acknowledged his team did a good job of stopping fellow senior Joee Gantan (five points) but the Panthers had few answers for Ghiden.

“(Ghiden) basically did anything he wanted to do,” Carter said. “We had no one to match up with him. We stopped one of the two but it was tough to stop both of them.”

At times, Benicia looked like the better team in the first half as Kade Lockrem and Evan Broome combined for 25 points and seven 3-pointers. The Panthers, however, knocked down just one long ball after halftime.

“Benicia is a good shooting team, but we were content with trading buckets instead of getting defensive stops,” Wedding said. “The focus in the second half was to get stops.”

Lockrem finished with a team-high 15 points, but just one in the second half. Broome had 13 points, just two points in the second half.

The Panthers led by as many as seven points in the second quarter, the final time at 40-33 with 1:52 left after a bucket by Amari Edwards (called a goal-tend by the officials). The Wolves, however, finished the half on a 7-2 spurt. Ghiden converted on a three-point play to start the run, Anthony Bitanga-Nyghen hit a shot in the lane and Ghiden hit an inside shot during the run. With that, the Wolves found themselves down just 42-40 heading into the locker room.

Benicia started to fade in the third quarter after missing five of six from the free throw line. That was something that troubled American Canyon in the first meeting but this time it came back to bite the Panthers.

“I think we ran out of gas (in the second half),” Carter explained. “American Canyon outrebounded us, we were missing Fuller and they put a box-and-one on Kade and we never adjusted.”

The Wolves led 58-50 with 1:10 left in the third quarter after an inside shot from LaVar Seay, but Benicia picked up the final bucket of the period on a layup from junior varsity call-up Ty Gaskin (nine points) to make it a six-point game.

From there, it was all Wolves. They outscored their rivals 21-10 in the final 8 minutes. Ghiden had 11 points in the fourth quarter and twice set his teammates for baskets. Ghiden’s previous high for points was 33, which came on Jan. 5 in a nonleague win over Rodriguez.

“Thirty-five points is huge,” Wedding said. “He’s capable of it. He’s a great player. It’s not really a surprise, but it was awesome to watch.”

Benicia got as close as six points early in the period on a Jon Lee (11 points) inside basket but wouldn’t get any closer.

Roman Madayag finished with nine points, Nguyen added eight and John Wade chipped in seven to help American Canyon. Lusung had five steals.

The game was the final SCAC contest for both schools in school history. Both teams are moving to the North Coast Section next school year but they’ll play in separate leagues.

Ghiden has played in a number of close games with Benicia in the last three seasons. Was this one the most satisfying?

“I would say so, yes,” he said. “We had one my sophomore year, but we actually lost that game.”

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